Abstract

This essay argues that the material invocation of Ovid's Metamorphoses in The Most Lamentable Roman Tragedie of Titus Andronicus (c. 1594) initiates an interrogation of the cultural politics of translation in early modern England. By comparing Shakespeare's play with Edward Ravenscroft's seventeenth-century revision, Titus Andronicus, or the Rape of Lavinia (first performed 1678, first published 1687), the discussion focuses on ways in which the processes and products of translation construct the gendered subject.